Wendy Red Star

About

Wendy Red Star

Contemporary artist Wendy Red Star creates multimedia works that explore Native American identity and the distance between romantic images of the Native American—such as those by Edward S. Curtis—and the world of Indians today. A widely available 1880 photograph of the Crow Peace Delegation to Washington, which included Red Star’s ancestor Medicine Crow (Peelatchiwaaxpáash), serves as the starting point for the installation. It includes Crow regalia, altered photographs and stuffed animals inspired by Medicine Crow’s ledger drawings of animals he saw at the National Zoo in Washington, such as the “big snake with legs” (crocodile). A portrait of Medicine Crow superimposed with Red Star’s face compresses the generations to show that contemporary Native Americans are a living link with this history.

“I want people to realize that the images of Medicine Crow are more than just a handsome Native man,” Red Star writes. “The images represent a human being, a reservation era chief, the forming of the Crow Indian reservation, the loss of Crow lands, the changing of a people, the resilience of a culture.”

Raised on the Crow Indian reservation in Montana, Red Star studied art at Montana State University and UCLA and now lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon. Her work is included in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and many other public and private collections.

This exhibition will be on display October 17, 2015 through January 17, 2016.

Presented through the Thomas A. and Mary Waterman Gildehaus Endowment Fund at the Figge Art Museum